Welcome to the twelfth annual edition of the Delmarva Review, our current contribution to discovering the best of new literary work. Our editors selected the original prose and poetry of fifty-three authors from thousands of submissions. Individually and collectively, the writing in this volume touches us as human beings. We can also enjoy the authors’ craft and unique voice in the telling of stories and poetry.

Our editors selected 72 poems, 10 short stories, and nine nonfiction essays. We also reviewed six recent books of special interest, by regional writers. In all, the authors come from 17 states, the District of Columbia, and four other countries.

The cover photograph, “Rough Water,” by contributing photographer Jay P. Fleming, perfectly embodies the themes from this year’s selections. Jay’s photograph captures the feeling of nature’s power and passion, which is expressed throughout this year’s writing.

Emily Rae Roberts

PRAIRIE FEVER

Mira had no choice but to be caught up in the moment of silence, sitting on the half-crumpled sheets in apartment 5D, neck craning uncomfortably to stare at the slow rotation of the off-white fan above her. The room, lit only by the late morning sunlight, shrank down to the steady circling of the blades. She had never noticed it before. A symptom of faulty wiring.

There came a sound like crashing from the other side of her bedroom wall, followed by the telltale snarling and snapping of her neighbors. They were wolves, she imagined, or stray and mangy dogs fighting over a scrap in a back alley, harsh barks and low growls muffled only by the thin layer of plaster between them. Her alarm began to beep, and she pulled herself to the edge of the mattress. Step one, turn it off. The beeping ceased but the wolves still scratched at the wall. “Stupid bitch!” Step two, get dressed. Mira stood before fumbling along the clutter of the floor to find a clean-enough pair of pants, a bra forgotten, a shirt that didn’t smell. She put them on methodically, treasonous eyes straying back to the ceiling fan.

Her living room had been overtaken by her research. Piles of books cluttered the floor, topped haphazardly with primary sources she’d scanned and printed for four cents a page. Copies of photographs of people with the smiles bleached from their faces by the unforgiving Western sun stared at her from where she had taped them to the wall.

This morning she remembered to brush her teeth, and she did it with the toothbrush hanging limply from her mouth, too busy scanning the diary of a doctor living in the 1840s describing in detail the medical maladies of the time: snake bites, dysentery, and, the worst of the lot, prairie fever.

At least snakes had the common decency to kill the victim quickly.

But prairie fever relied on the perceived fragility of the mind, striking those on their homesteads all alone, miles away from the nearest neighbor. It ate away at the hope for the future that drove them to the West. Prairie fever infected the very essence of yourself that spurred you to keep moving, living, and dreaming until it all rotted away. Kansas was a breeding ground for the fever. How could it not be? It’s a wasteland, where, in a good year, you eke out enough living to afford to clothe your family in something besides old flour sacks. It’s a place where, in the bad years, the fires tear through the dry grass. Your sod house floods with half a foot of stagnant water. Locusts descend to eat every growing life (you could try to cover your cabbages with cloth, but they’ll eat that too). A sudden blizzard rolls in to cull your herd of cattle. No wonder people went crazy. Bad years outnumbered the good.

Her phone chirped again. Mira placed the book upside down on the porcelain edge and leaned over to spit in the sink, watching with slight satisfaction as the splotch crawled toward the drain.

Five minutes later, with her Jansport backpack slung over her shoulder, she wheeled her old, worn bicycle to the waiting elevator.

When her mother and father had presented the obnoxiously pink, floral bicycle on her thirteenth birthday, she had been thrilled. In the meantime, after years of riding through the suburb’s paved cul-de-sacs and the occasional crash into innocent bushes, the paint had begun to chip and the front “T” attached to the handlebars was permanently bent slightly to the right, a quirk that caused her to gently veer toward the nearest brick wall. But because she loved the stupid thing, and she couldn’t afford a new backpack, much less a car, Mira dutifully climbed aboard and cycled to one of two destinations: school or Beijing Palace, the only good Chinese place within two miles that refused to deliver.

Today she turned north toward campus while her mind wandered to Western trails of 1842.

On the surface, the streets were desolate, except for the indifferent tumbling of litter, moving steadily along with the wind, like Mira, as if having an appointment to get to and no time for the others around them. But beneath the surface of calm, the city was alive, thriving as the prairie does, with life hidden beneath the careful shelter of the waving grasses and blooming flowers. Instead of prairie dogs and beetles, rats skittered in the shelter of alleyways and cockroaches traced hidden highways in the towering brick buildings, driven into apartment walls by the dropping temperatures.

But, much like the prairie, life was a tender thing, burning out as readily as it had sprung up blazing.

Without warning, two hissing, screeching tomcats tumbled out of a nearby alleyway, all puffed fur and bared fangs. Instinctively, Mira jerked her handlebars. By pure luck, she managed to avoid the pair. Skirting around the two, she turned her head to appraise the showdown happening at 11:42 a.m. It looked like the ginger was winning, but the black was scarred and scrappy.

She wondered idly, as she rounded the next corner, if she would ever see the loser again. Probably not. Such was the way of life, after all.

It still felt wrong to pass room 106, standing like a ghost town with its darkened windows and bolted door. Mira knew if she was to press her forehead against the cool glass she would see the familiar room and that old oak desk with most of its knickknacks standing guard as they gathered dust. Her current advisor’s office was nothing like it, cold and clinical with its burnished silver accents and the bookcases that stared down at Mira. She pulled herself away from the office, continuing her journey, which grew more tiring step after step as she dragged herself up the stairs that seemed like mountains.

Dr. Hymshaw was waiting, all crisp shirt and heavy brows, staring up at her as she hesitantly knocked on the doorframe. “Come in, Ms. Reed.”

Dr. Stanton never called her that. She would have stood up from her cluttered work space, face brightening as she dragged out “Mira” like it was taffy and offered her a cup of tea and her choice of chocolate from the George Washington bowl. Why don’t you pick George’s brain, Mira? Hymshaw could bludgeon her with the way he said Reed.

Mira sat down cautiously, swinging her backpack around and brandishing it like a torn fabric shield on her lap. He looked at her and she saw smoke on the horizon, the dangerous wisps that spoke of coming ruination. She could already feel the panic rising up in her throat. Her fingers itched to gather up the water-soaked flour sacks and beat it back, those flames that threatened everything she lived for. Instead, her hand reached back to stroke her auburn hair, and Mira realized, belatedly, that she had forgotten to brush her hair in the morning when she found a matted hunk near her neck.

“Have you decided your argument?” he asked. The movement of his folding hands caught her attention.

“No. I’m still reading. But I think I’m going to rely on prairie fever as a frontier epidemic. I’m thinking about how it’s not just the physical environment that makes people lose it.”

This was not true. She had decided her argument, but that was back with Stanton, who nodded her head energetically whenever Mira had let slide she was considering prairie fever as the subject of her thesis. A gentle prod to the right path might accompany it, but Stanton had always listened in a way that made Mira’s words feel worth something.

“What do you mean?”

“When you boil down the instances of prairie fever, it’s just psychotic breaks. But people have meltdowns in the modern era, in cities and suburbs and in clinical doctor’s offices. Depression can happen anywhere for any reason. It can’t be just the emptiness. It has to be something more. A human factor that the prairie taps into. Some phenomena that can be explained using the prairie.”

“Yes,” Dr. Hymshaw nods. “But Ms. Reed, this is history. It is not the social sciences or psychology. We don’t answer these questions. I understand your previous advisor encouraged you to go beyond the span of our field, but if you want to have a successful thesis review, you need to focus more on the time, on the primary sources. Do they support this?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” the graying man said, thin lips disappearing into the set line of his mouth, “then you don’t really have an argument at all. I’m going to send a couple of essays to you. Maybe seeing what other historians are arguing could help you finalize your thesis. But, as a reminder, your deadline is in two weeks. After that, we will need to begin serious prepping for your review in May. You’re already very behind.”

She could see the flames now, in her mind, eating their way through the dry grasses toward the work she had carefully cultivated since she had graduated from undergrad two years back. “Yeah.”

Mira had missed six calls from her mother. Had it really been four days since they’d spoken? Her thumb hovered hesitantly over the green phone icon as she slowed her descent down the ornate front stairs of the history department. She tucked it to her side before venturing toward the place where she had chained her bike to a streetlamp. What was there even to talk about? Hello, yes, I didn’t kill a cat, so I think I had a good day.

Or maybe she was having a bad day. It was hard to tell. But there was only a wheel chained to the post.

Mira glanced up and down the street. No bicycle.

She didn’t want to talk to her mother, but her voice still played in her ears. Mira, you need to quit it with this thing. There’s a whole lotta history. Gotta be somethin’ less depressing. But it wasn’t just something, was it? No, like she had whined harshly five days ago. It was everything.

She kicked the wheel out of spite. Who even takes a bicycle with only one wheel? It isn’t even a bicycle at that point. Sighing, Mira bent to unchain the lonely wheel and instead looped it through the handle at the top of her backpack, leaving it to dangle there and anchor her more firmly to the ground with its insistent weight. It deserved a proper burial, that only piece left.

The temperature dropped steadily, the January skies harboring thick, gray clouds that threatened and menaced the people below. They were the kind of gray that warned you to buy milk and bread and peanut butter at the store, just in case.

Mira was reminded of a story she had read, years ago, as she drudged in the direction of home. Maybe it had started all of this. Maybe not. Like many of the things she read these days, it took place on the Kansas prairie. A young woman heard every night for weeks the howling of encircling wolves, driven by hunger to the promise of her little sod house. Her husband was gone somewhere. She was alone.

And one night, when she heard the wolves through the dirt walls, she left the gun on the table, flung open the doors, and walked out into the void of the dark flatlands where the beasts tore her into pieces. Another casualty of the fever.

Mira clenched her phone harder in her fist. How were they all so easily infected? Who would throw themselves to the mercy of hungry wolves?

But in a way she understood, and that understanding hit her with the force of a bullet. It left her floundering, tumbling until her mind was pinned to the ground by some stronger beast. A wolf, or maybe a feral cat.

Mira stopped in the center of the sidewalk, watching the people part around her seamlessly. Her cellphone threatened to fall to its death as her fingers went limp, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. The others stretched all around her, heads bobbing in an undulating wave of movement. There was no beginning, no end, just the endless stretch as far as she could see in front of her. She was choked by it.

This was her frontier, a barren prairie of concrete and glass.

The snow began falling, thick and heavy, dampening the sounds of the people and Mira’s slow footsteps as she lumbered, dazed and sluggish, toward home.

Mira took the stairs. The burn of her thighs and back, and the slapping of the one loose bicycle tire, felt good. There was the number 5, bold and shiny in cheap chipped copper plating. Pushing open the door, she entered her hallway, walking slowly and leaving in occasional intervals a drop of white from the snow. It had begun to melt when she started her ascent, and it soaked into what it could and sloughed off what it couldn’t.

Mindlessly she trudged past A, past B, but stilled when she heard the wolves growling and snapping in apartment C. She hardly registered her own raised hand, poised to knock. Dare she? No, no. Not now. Not with the cold wetness soaking into her bones.

There was 5D, waiting for her. And when she opened the door, she was greeted by the symptoms of her own fever. Papers strewn across every available surface. Black-and-white photos and her own scribbled notes taped to the wall.

Mira began to shake, the cold replaced with something warmer, a fire in her stomach. Her backpack slid to the floor, the metallic clang ringing empty in her ears. Her movements were staccato.

The winds howled. Somewhere a black tomcat shivered in the snow, scarred and bleeding, but alive.

The woman walked to the window, fiddling with the latch and tugging, straining, lifting until it opened with a pop, and a gust of wind and cold surged into the space. Papers fluttered on the walls, slid off coffee tables, and scattered across her floor. Trembling hands gathered the nearest pile and with a cry flung them out.

They floated, listless and lifeless on the winter wind, blending with the white so that it was all she could see out there. Nothing¾not a building, not a person, not a tree or a bird or a cat. Just the white. It was blinding, but the blindness brought no calm. Her fingers ached with cold from where she gripped the sill. She yanked the window down, body shaking from more than the damp. And when she left her apartment, wandered back outside to the streets, the fever still burned hot in her stomach and pricked at her eyes.

John J. McKeon

CANTABILE

Schubert, it is said, had fat and awkward hands. Though his music sings, he never learned to play the piano really well. Contrast this with the plaster cast of Chopin’s hands, supposedly done immediately after his death. The fingers seem to me implausibly slender and long, but no matter. We impute magic to objects like an artist’s hands, just as we weighed and measured Einstein’s brain, looking for some simple fact of flesh and structure that would enable us to shrug and say, well, no wonder. We have no similar preoccupation with Beethoven’s hands. Rather, his hair, flying, unruly. He had Einstein’s hair, or perhaps Einstein had his.

Occasionally someone will remark on my own long, thin fingers, and if they know of my pianism, they will smile and nod in just that knowing way. Of course. How could Liszt or Rachmaninoff hold any terrors for a woman with such big hands? And I did launch my career on just this basis: the flirty ingénue, the merest wisp of a girl, rampaging through the alpha male repertory, all while showing more skin than might be expected.

It worked for a while. I did the global whirligig for a decade, until the bookings began to slow. I have read an account that states simply that Annie Molloy disappeared from public view after marrying a surgeon. Some truth there, I suppose. God knows I enjoyed my husband more than the umpteenth night of Prokofiev in Poughkeepsie.

Today I am no wisp of a girl, and if I am flirty it is in the manner of an elderly lady who thinks she can get away with something.

What saved me, and saves me still, is Cantabile, my immense and ramshackle house on the edge of the Choptank River near Cambridge, Maryland. I have no children, and my husband is gone, taken by a heart attack a decade ago. But the house endures, and I along with it.

It is, as I say, a big house, twenty-six rooms in all, and I have filled it with pianos: a showcase grand in the main parlor, and other uprights and grands tucked in everywhere. Eight times a year, I also fill the house with amateur pianists from all over the country, some of them coming year after year to spend two weeks living and breathing piano. I’ve recruited a staff of skilled and patient teachers. I teach myself, and I love it. We have an excellent cook, and my campers bring their own booze. I don’t take anyone under 21.

Philip was the exception, from the day his uncle’s Volvo dropped him at my door fully 30 years ago. A glorious day of early fall, the herons at the river’s edge holding their poses, the grass bright and the river like blue ice. Philip was sixteen, and I welcomed him because the chairman of the music department at New York University, an acquaintance who had once wanted to be my lover, said he had never heard anyone like Philip and two weeks with me would be just the thing.

Philip had the ideal pianist’s hands, I noticed from the kitchen window. It was arrival day, and the house was loud with laughter and greetings. Philip dropped his duffel bag on the gravel and clutched to his chest a thick canvas case in which, I guessed, he had brought along every scrap of sheet music he owned. He clutched the case like the floatable cushion from an airplane seat, hoping it would keep him alive but somehow doubting it. His fingers curled around the bottom of the case, the knuckles visible from a distance, the flesh very white. I forced myself to stop spying and hurried outside to greet him.

As I had feared, Philip never did fit in. He was decades younger than the others and sipped Dr Pepper during happy hour while the others whittled down their wine stocks. The older women embarrassed him with their attention, while the men ignored or visibly resented him. He couldn’t tell a joke, didn’t follow sports, and couldn’t answer a question with more than a syllable or two.

What he could do was play the piano.

That first morning, I found myself drawn upstairs by an unfamiliar sound: scales. When I say our campers all love the piano and want earnestly to play better, I do not mean to imply any enthusiasm for such tedium as scale practice. Yet there it was. In every key, major and minor, not just the easy keys with the standard fingerings but the variants and oddities as well, four octaves up and down, slowly and quickly, in four-four time, three-four, triplets, in parallel and contrary motion, even with the left hand offset by half a bar. And all played with perfect evenness and fluidity. I noted the room from which this marvel was emerging and checked the day’s schedule: Philip.

At our first lesson Philip told me he had been working on the Chopin Etudes. Not unusual: nearly every reasonably proficient amateur wants to tackle an etude or two to measure himself. Which etudes? I asked.

Philip sat at the piano in my studio with his legs crossed. Mine is the finest instrument in the house, and Philip had taken it in with his first glance on entering and now sat running his fingertips along the keys. “Well,” he said, “all of them, really.”

Over the next hour I discovered that he could, indeed, play all twenty-seven etudes well and from memory. In such a case, the teacher becomes more of a coach. There was nothing I could teach Philip, no technique he lacked, no errors to correct. So I tried to coach him on interpretive choices, to encourage him to listen to himself more closely, to show him the little energy-saving tricks that could help a performer get through such large swathes of difficult music without cramping or breaking down. When we were done, I said, “What are your plans, Philip? Juilliard? Curtis?”

“I’ll be starting at Johns Hopkins in September,” he said.

“So,” I nodded, smiling, “Peabody. I know a number of the faculty there. You’ll do well.”

“No, not the conservatory,” Philip said. “Engineering.”

“Engineering?” I realized as I said it that I sounded shocked and patronizing, and hastened to add, “Have you not considered a career in music?”

“I don’t want to be a professional musician,” he said.

“With your gift, you’d be...” I almost said “a natural” but stopped myself because I don’t believe such a thing exists and because I knew very well how much labor had gone into creating what I had just heard. “You could be extraordinary,” I said.

“Okay, sure,” I said. Philip was looking down and scratching the back of his hand. I suspected I had stepped into a long-running argument, and while Philip seemed uncomfortable telling me to mind my own business, that was just what he had done and would do again if pressed.

He stayed the two weeks, filled his practice shifts, warmed up only slightly in social settings, and, as his contribution to our informal concluding concert, played something relatively easy. I was sure I would never see him again, but the final day, after the last car had pulled out of the drive, as I walked through the hallway of the again-silent house, I took from the table the advance signup sheet for the following year, and there was Philip’s name, halfway down. He would be back. I chuckled, shook my head, and thought about practicing more myself.

Philip did come back the next year, and the next. I tried to guide him into new repertory and paired him with a couple of other accomplished campers for some duet work. When the fourth year began looming and he had not signed up, I dropped him a note to say that if he hadn’t decided yet, I could still hold a spot for him for several more weeks.

He wrote in reply to thank me and to say that he had enlisted in the Marine Corps.

A legend about Glenn Gould, one of the many, concerns the way he walked away from his public career at its peak. He was world famous, in enormous demand. One night, he was pacing backstage when a stagehand asked for an autograph. He signed the program, dated it, and wrote “my last concert” under the date.

I have built myself a similar legend. How I played an afternoon recital in San Diego. Hall half empty, mind elsewhere. Afterward, a dozen or so autographs, the usual smiles, all dinner invitations declined in favor of room service. The next morning, someone named Richard Salazar said in the newspaper that my Liszt Sonata had been “the longest 30 minutes in many a year.”

I tried to work up a robust hate for this man I did not know, but couldn’t. He was right.

Besides, plenty of seats had gone unsold before anyone knew what a snore my recital would be. Time for honesty, I thought on the return flight. I had met Charles and wanted no more Sundays anywhere but home. I had another half dozen commitments to fulfill, but I let my managers know that would be it for a while. I don’t recall any disappointed groans.

Charles was then finishing a clinical fellowship at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He owned a beautiful rowhouse in Baltimore, and that’s where we lived when we first married. I moved my small grand piano from my old apartment. I gave lessons to kids who didn’t want them, plus the occasional adult who lived for them. I found I loved my sessions with the grown-ups and, little by little, weeded the kids out of my garden. Then I read about an adult piano camp in Vermont and thought: I could make a go of that here. I had always lived frugally, and my savings were more than ample to buy Cantabile when I stumbled on it and to gather up a bunch of old but sound pianos. Charles toured the house once, declared that the plumbing and electric bills alone would break the bank, and let me know he would never want to live there. OK, I said, I don’t mean to live here, either, except during camps.

I painted the house myself. I sanded and refinished the floors. I hung my old concert posters, programs, photos, and framed reviews all over the halls. By way of cementing my commitment, I took one last big bite out of my savings and bought a big new grand piano. And one day, while waiting endlessly for a delivery of new kitchen appliances, I dragged out my thick book of the Beethoven Sonatas, Volume I, opened to Sonata Number One in F minor, and started again to learn.

The day years later when I got Philip’s note about joining the Marines, I went to my studio and found Volume III of the Sonatas, creased, stained and dog-eared, on the floor next to the piano. I opened to the last of the thirty-two in C minor, turned to the final movement. And when I was finished I sat on the bench and cried, thinking of Philip in fatigues, thinking of his beautiful hands adjusting the telescopic sight of a sniper’s rifle, thinking I would never see him again or hear him play, thinking this was a great pity, a great pity.

Then, one day about four years after Philip’s note, his name turned up in a monthly report from my CPA. He had paid a deposit to return to Cantabile that fall.

Students for that camp began arriving about two hours after Charles departed. My husband, the distinguished and now wealthy surgeon, had taken the better part of one of his valuable days to drive out from Baltimore because he felt he needed to tell me face to face that our marriage was, from his perspective, less than optimal; that he felt he owed himself the opportunity of a fresh start with someone who would be more…what was his word? Committed, yes, committed to him and only him. Charles also felt that he was still relatively young and that, statistically speaking, his field of choices was encouragingly large. He would be quite generous in terms of a settlement, anything I wanted, really, and since I clearly did not want the same stylish urban life that he did, this was really for the best.

I suspected he had already winnowed his encouraging large field of choices to one, a distinctly stylish and urban young yoga instructor with the right body and the right hair to be just the right ornament for his Mercedes convertible. But as he stood in the foyer making his oh-so-persuasive case, I found I didn’t care much, just wanted him gone before the campers arrived.

The Philip who was dropped off at my door that August was bigger than the boy I had last seen, and he had let his hair grow. He lugged a duffel bag of clothing and a slim portfolio case of music, and he walked with a slight limp. When I came to hug him, he pivoted toward me oddly, and it was only a minute later, as he made his way up the hall stairs, that I realized his right leg was prosthetic.

I had heard about the embassy bombing, of course, but I had not seen Philip’s name in the newspapers. Three of his fellow Marines had been killed, and a dozen injured, and committees in both houses of Congress wanted to know why this and why that and why some other thing.

“It was a dangerous place,” was all Philip would say, the first evening in our welcome reception.

A hot night, faint breeze through the big screened porch where we gathered. Philip had come downstairs in shorts, and his artificial leg was the unmentioned center of attention. He knew quite a few of his fellow campers and seemed at ease, though he still preferred Dr Pepper to wine. The conversation danced around more or less gracefully, until finally a fellow camper asked, “So, do you pedal with your left leg now?” Philip laughed. And then the subject vanished in laughter, drink, and music-chat. I realized, also, that I had blindly made a wise choice by rooming Philip with Bradley, a veteran of the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm. Bradley—never just Brad—walked with a slight limp and had, he said, a picturesque web of scars on his lower back as the result of an encounter with an amateur bomb in Kuwait. I saw him now, gazing benignly at Philip, and then his eyes shifted to meet mine and I thought he nodded, ever so slightly.

And I saw them in conversation, around dusk the next day, sitting on the low concrete wall that reinforced the riverbank. I noticed a tiny red glow passing between them and smiled, sniffing the air.

Any big old house makes noise, and if you sleep alone in such a house you come to terms with the noises. The porch screens hum in the breeze, and each time the refrigerator cycles on, the picture frames vibrate in the stairwell behind the kitchen. That night, or rather in the quietest hours of the morning, I found myself lying awake, thinking intermittently about my defunct marriage and empty future, staring up into the darkness and listening for a tiny sound that was not part of the usual. Once, when I had first moved into the house, a swarm of bees had somehow taken over the living room, and they had made just such a faint clamor by banging against the bay window in their effort to get out. But this was different, far too rhythmic, and it stopped altogether from time to time. I got out of bed and passed, barefoot and stealthy, through the short corridor linking my suite to the rest of the house.

Dim light rose through the stairwell, and I moved slowly halfway down the stairs. The noise came from the keys of the digital piano on the landing below, left there for silent practice during quiet hours. I had never realized the keys made any sound at all. Even now, only a few feet away, I had to listen acutely. More audible were Philip’s grunts, snorts, and occasional whispers as he stopped, clenched and unclenched his fists, and jumped back into whatever he was so furiously practicing. His leg lay on the floor beside the bench; he was practicing without pedal, working on accuracy and speed. And he was becoming increasingly frustrated. At any moment he might quit and turn around; not wanting to be caught spying, I crept back to my bed.

So it went for four days. In truth, I was frightened by the energy I sensed in Philip’s silent practice, by the way he lunged through every setback and seemed to want to tear gashes in the music and leave it panting. I crept to the stairwell each of three straight nights, lingering where I could retreat should he turn abruptly, watching his hands, those white, big-knuckled hands that had fascinated me on my first sight of him flying¾sometimes a foot above the keyboard, and sometimes sinking deeply into the keys to draw out a love song. I had first risen from bed because I could not sleep. Now I could not sleep because I wanted, every night, to sit here and listen to Philip’s stunning, exhausting silence.

When not enthralled by his hands I gazed at the stump of his leg. His prosthesis lay on the floor. The stump projected eight inches from his gym shorts, the crisscrossing surgical scars not yet faded. It embarrassed me. It seemed a shockingly intimate sight, the nudest thing I had ever seen. Yet I could not turn away.

I sought him out one afternoon as he sat on the porch and gazed across the river.

“Philip,” I said, “forgive me for prying, but what are you practicing at night?”

My question startled him. “Have I disturbed you? I was using the earphones.”

“Oh, no, no, I’m sure you aren’t bothering anyone. I simply stumbled on you the other night, when I had gotten up for some other reason entirely. Point is, you were going at it hammer and tongs.”

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, falling into a series of small nods. “I have been meaning to ask your advice on something,” he said. “I have been invited to play at the White House, on Veterans Day.”

“Philip, that’s wonderful!”

“Is it?” he held my gaze for a moment. “Or is it a PR stunt? The Marine Band is pulling together a whole bunch of us wounded warriors, a bunch of guys who left pieces and parts in various shithole corners of the world but somehow manage to live rich and rewarding lives through music. It’s supposed to be inspirational.”

“Sounds like you doubt it.”

“My first impulse was to tell them to go fuck themselves.” Perhaps I still thought of Philip as a little boy, but the obscenity struck me hard.

“Then I thought,” he went on, “maybe if I do really well, somebody will hear and want to hire me for other stuff. Even accompanist gigs, piano bars, anything would be better than just sitting around my mom’s house.”

“It could happen,” I said. “Though I’d hate to think of you doing requests for a room full of drunks.”

“I’ve done it before. It ain’t that bad.”

“But.”

“But,” he said, and fell silent.

“What does Bradley say?”

“Bradley is strongly in favor of the go-fuck-yourself option,” Philip said. “In fact, he says I should accept, perform, knock them on their asses, and then tell the president to his face to go fuck himself.”

“And you? What do you think?”

Philip was silent a long time, or it seemed so. Finally: “When I first came back, I was in the hospital in Bethesda, and on Memorial Day they loaded us into buses and brought us down to the Mall for the concert. Got us nice seats, front row, so we’d all be on TV. There was some C-list actor who got famous playing a disabled vet, plus a bunch of Hollywood bimbos emoting about how much they appreciated us, what heroes we were. All the while I’m thinking, if I approached you in a bar, your bodyguards would beat me bloody. Then they loaded us back on the bus and brought us home. Hurray for the vets, now go away.”

“To me. I’d also consider something shorter and less aggressive than the Liszt. It’s a social occasion, after all.”

Philip smiled, his gaze unfocused across the wide river. “Well, I guess I’ll think about it.”

I lumbered on: “Or, if you really must bring down the house, work with me on it. I would never program it myself, I meant it when I said I couldn’t play it. But I studied it with Alfred Brendel back in the day, and I know it, I know where the snakes are. Stay here for the next six weeks. You’ll have your room to yourself, all the privacy you want, and you can practice on the Steinway in the living room. We’ll work on it together every day. Put a fine edge on the piece before you ride it into battle.”

“I couldn’t afford that,” Philip said.

“No charge. Throw a little something into the grocery fund from time to time, is all.” I stood to leave, and at the door to the house I turned back. “You’re not a performing seal, Philip,” I said. “Seals do things for scraps of raw fish. I don’t know what payoff you’re after.”

That fall, as Philip practiced in the living room, I began work in my study. I would assemble a recital program, I thought, then call in whatever IOUs I might still have to see if I could stage a comeback. A small venue in DC or Baltimore would be best, affordable but still credible as a professional stage. Instead of my old pyrotechnic warhorses, I would play a thoughtful program, suitable for a mature artist, and we’d see what happened.

What happened, most immediately: On our fourth day of work, I had put my hand onto the Steinway keyboard to illustrate a fingering, and all at once Philip’s hand was on top of mine, softly enclosing, and he turned toward me on the bench.

“Philip, we have work to do,” I said.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Not that kind of work,” I said. He let his hand linger a moment, looked into my eyes, and squeezed. He did not mean to alarm me, I don’t think, but the strength in his hands made me imagine bones crunching. “Philip, please,” I said. “I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“And I’m missing a leg, or hadn’t you noticed?” he said, not letting go.

“Please let go of my hand,” I said softly. He did not let go.

“I know I’m damaged. But everyone is damaged somehow,” he said, now turning and taking my other hand in his, though I tried to squirm away. “Philip,” I said more sternly, rising from the bench. He let my hands slip away and hung his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m flattered. But we’d never be good for each other.”

“We’d be great together, and you know it.”

“I don’t know it. And if this sort of thing happens again, you will have to leave.”

We went back to work. Philip did not try again. He certainly could have forced me, I realized. We were alone in the house, and he was very strong. Was I attracted to him? Of course I was; he was beautiful. Those hands! But I thought his ardor for me reflected deprivation and proximity more than anything else. He could have better than me, but I would do in a pinch. I was much older than he, and gravity had had its way with my body. Yet I was sure I could please him. I wanted to, and I knew how. And after all, my Charles had gotten himself a new toy¾why shouldn’t I? Then I thought: I won’t do it precisely because Charles has.

None of this kept the thought from my mind, often at the most unlikely moments. Finally, I made a pact with myself. Later, after the concert, after his triumph—our triumph—we would return to Cantabile that night, no matter how late, and we’d come back into the dark, welcoming house, and if he were still interested then, I would make love to him, all he wanted, and almost enough.

Sometimes in life, you have to wait for the punch line. In Charles’ case, he lived the life he wanted for another six years after he left me, with his box at the opera and his club seats at the football games, and he and his magnificent Celine blasting their megawatt smiles at the photographers at the Cancer Ball.

He eventually deceased himself, as they say, while in the act. I smirked to think of God tapping him on the shoulder right in the middle of that most pleasurable of moments. His quietus smacked him in the chest and he let out a gasp, and a gush, and then his lifeless face landed perfectly between Celine’s spectacular breasts. And she thought he was merely spent, and went on stroking his hair for several moments, until his unresponsiveness annoyed her and she poked him in the ribs. Surprise, Celine.

I didn’t know any of that when I made my pact, but I knew the long-term future was a sucker bet, and I started the next day content with my decision.

As Veterans Day approached Philip put me on his guest list for the White House concert and left off practicing three days beforehand. Enough, he said, he was ready. The concert would be recorded the afternoon before the holiday and broadcast the next night.

Of the event itself, I have minimal impressions. I was seated well to the back of the East Room, and the acoustics were awful. The president spoke without a microphone. A cellist played, and a blues guitarist, and a young woman did a good job on a tough aria, and then it was Philip’s turn, and he brought his volcanic piece off without a hitch. So much so that the East Room, a well of polite applause if ever one existed, erupted in a standing ovation that went on for three minutes.

Then the president stepped forward and held out his hand, and Philip put his hands behind his back. He said something I couldn’t hear. The president’s smile never faltered but his eyes darted and in a moment Philip had been whisked away. In the post-concert crush I made my way to his side and asked, “What happened?”

“Just what I intended from the beginning,” he said, staring at me and daring me to scold him. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“No, Philip,” I said. “You go. I’ll stay in DC overnight. You take tomorrow to clear your things out of the house.”

“Annie? You’re throwing me out?”

“Music isn’t meant for spite, Philip. You can’t do what you did and be with me.”

At that, he pulled himself up straight and gave me an overstated, sarcastic salute, then walked away.

He was entirely excised from the broadcast, the twenty-minute gap made up with filler. It was as though he had never played, had never been there at all.

Was I wrong to think music could heal Philip? To think something as prosaic as playing the piano could untie so many knots? It was a faith of sorts. We hear the ecstasy in Beethoven’s late music and forget the wretched man. He wrote of kisses for all the world, but his own last gesture in life was a raised fist.

My faith had not even saved me, really. I was alone, in the quietly echoing house on the river. The sun was going down, the birds skimming across the water, diving to bring sudden death to tiny fish deceived to the surface by the dwindling light. So it went, I thought. We watch our weight and eat our veggies and get cancer anyway. We volunteer in soup kitchens and shelters only to be hit by a bus on our way home. We pull ourselves up, shake our fists at heaven, and still die.

I was so exhausted that night that I considered sleeping in my reading chair. But in the end I got up and went to the piano and played, and played through the night to the dawn, ending by playing Bach chorales and singing at the top of my lungs in my lousy German. And then the sun was up and the day had begun and Philip was gone and the fish in the river were doomed.

Well, I thought, there we are. Music doesn’t cure. It doesn’t save, nor redeem. But it’s the only thing I know that doesn’t make everything worse.

With humble deference to the great literature of the ages, this collection of poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction is proof that all stories have not already been told. Here, each writer gives us an original, new voice. The creative pen endures. Welcome to the eleventh annual Delmarva Review, a literary journal publishing exceptional new writing.

Our editors selected the work of 45 authors that stood out from thousands of submissions. Enclosed are 57 poems, 10 short stories, 11 nonfiction and four micro nonfiction selections. We also reviewed five recent books by regional writers. In all, the authors come from 19 states and two other countries.

A common theme emerged from this year’s writing: the discovery or realization of individuality. Often during difficult times, adversity leaves its impression on one’s identity; it shapes us. It can also be celebrated. Individuality and creativity are inseparable.

Volume 11 is available in print and digital editions worldwide from major online booksellers as well as regional libraries and bookstores on the Delmarva Peninsula.

Volume 10, celebrating the tenth anniversary of Delmarva Review, touches on the themes of change and hope, among many others. It is a special issue for those who worked on it, a milestone of our dedication to publishing the finest in literary arts. The issue contains the work of 40 authors from 18 states.

The issue also features the poet, Gibbons Ruark, interviewed by poetry editor Anne Colwell. We’re pleased to share two of Ruark’s poems from his wonderful collection The Road to Ballyvaughan.

Volume 10 is available in print and digital editions worldwide from major online booksellers as well as regional libraries and bookstores on the Delmarva Peninsula.

Volume 9 contains the poetry and prose of thirty-six authors from 11 states. We encourage the work of authors in the greater Chesapeake region, and we welcome all writers, regardless of residence. The writing in this edition includes: forty-seven poems, eight short stories, and 10 essays and memoirs. We also review five recent books by regional authors.

In recognition of William Shakespeare's 400th birthday, we are featuring the work of Shakespearean actor and poet James Keegan, from Milton, Delaware, in this issue.

Volume 9 is available in print and digital editions worldwide from major online booksellers as well as regional libraries and bookstores on the Delmarva Peninsula.

The 2015 edition presents new poetry and prose from thirty-five contributors in 12 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. They probe diverse human themes including individualism, acceptance, loss, birth, death, love, healing, and a sense of belonging in the larger world. The issue opens with a conversation between the poetry editor and Sue Ellen Thompson about her celebrated book, They, in which Ms. Thompson uses poetry to explore family and generational issues of acceptance over having a trans-gender child.

Volume 8 is available in print and digital editions worldwide from major online booksellers (Amazon.com, Kindle, etc.), as well as regional libraries and bookstores on the Delmarva Peninsula.

The 2014 edition presents the work of 40 contributors from 14 states, Washington, D.C., and one foreign country. Readers, many of whom are writers and teachers, will find diversity of craft and narrative voice among the compelling pieces selected for this edition.

Volume 7 is available in print and ebook editions from all major online booksellers as well as regional libraries and bookstores. Online distribution is virtually worldwide.

In the 2013 edition you will discover the imaginative work of 23 authors from nine states and the District of Columbia. The editors selected Ron Capps, founder of the Veterans Writing Project, as the featured writer for his personal essay, "Writing My Way Home," in this edition. He reminds us of the power of writing to heal and cope after experiencing unimaginable physical and psychological adversity. Thirty-one poems, from 11 poets, represent a wide range of poetic voice and form. They lead us to unexpected moments of beauty and insight. The fiction section contains seven stories. "Undertow" offers a penetrating view of self-esteem and misunderstanding. A flash fiction piece probes personal identity. In another story, the author creates the authentic voice of an Iranian girl facing generational complexity on her journey to experience love. In all, the stories explore freedom, aging, loss, and life's unanticipated consequences.

Volume 6 is available in print and ebook editions from all major online booksellers as well as regional libraries and bookstores.

Volume 5 features new prose and poetry from 27 authors, most from Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, the tristate Delmarva region. In all, the review includes authors from nine states, the District of Columbia and three foreign countries.